The third annual Blockparty (now I believe the longest running US demo party) took place Saturday night at during Notacon. Demo parties are competitions where coders enter their programs and audience members vote on them. Along with the standard “demo” category, the organizers of Blockparty expanded to include several different categories. One of them was music, so I decided to write, record and enter my own song.

My interest in demos and the demo scene goes back to the Commodore 64, so I knew up front I wanted to record a tribute to the 64. I know nothing of 8-bit recording techniques, so that was out. I considered recording samples from 8-bit games into a modern program and restructuring them into a song, but I didn’t want to create an entire song out of other people’s sound samples, so I dropped that idea too. While listening to Run DMC during my recent road trip to Pennsylvania, it hit me — I’ll record a rap! Raps are relatively easy to write and perform as is loop-based music, so that’s what I decided to do.

The end result was “You Can’t Handle the Commodore,” a three-minute song written in the style of an old-school “rap battle”. Rap, and especially the rap I used to listen to growing up, has always been filled with “battle” songs — you know, “I’m so bad” and “I could kick your butt” and stuff like that … so after listening to several hours of old Run DMC, Ice-T, NWA and LL Cool J albums to get me in the mood, I sat down and wrote the lyrics to my song.


This audio is part of the collection: cDc paramedia audio
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Artist/Composer: Flack
Date: 2009-04-27
Keywords: flack; cDc communications; cult of the dead cow; ninja strike force; commodore; commodore 64; video games; videogames; 1980s; c64; blockparty; demoparty; rap; hip-hop; rap battle;

Creative Commons license: Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0

Notes

Also included here are the lyrics, with a ton of notations added to explain all the jokes. Note that unless you are familiar with the C64 and much of its library, most of this won’t seem very funny.

As you can tell, I tried to cram an awful lot of jokes and references into a three-minute song. My minimum goal was one joke or reference every other line, and I tried to put one per line where I could do so without making it feel forced.

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